The Cradle To The Grey
by Zarius
Summary: In the year 4025, Gravis Stane returns to his offices to find the P6 interface is missing from the Comber archives. With Interpretive Time proving to be a ratings winner, can he succesfully negotiate it's return with one "Mr. Jones?"


**TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES:**

**THE CRADLE TO THE GREY**

**WRITTEN BY ZARIUS**

**NOTE: A follow-up to my previous one-shots "A Dry Spot in the Oceon" and "A Season In The Blue", please read those fics before proceeding  
**

**DISCLAIMER: TMNT and all related characters are trademarked by Nickelodeon. All original characters are mine**

* * *

**NEW YORK**

**4025**

The large cylinder shaped skyscraper, displaying an infra-red lightshow above the cold crisp skyline of the city, paved the way for the heli-jet as it touched down on the building's rooftop.

Emerging from the heli-jet was a rather bulky man in a silver and gold pinstripe suit, a large cigarette clenched in his teeth. His fingernails slightly blackened with soot and grease from some of the food he had been consuming on the long flight back home. He slowly walked down the flight of unhinged floating stairs that had flown out of a compartment in the heli-jet to assist him in his disembarking.

Greeted by a hologram of a rather exquisite looking beauty in a nurse's outfit, the man walked towards a small glass elevator, entering it, he pressed a button and the elevator descended down a flight of floors leading to his central office

The man took the time to analyze the hologram's attire

"That's a 30th century level appearance, I thought you wanted to be more retro, something around the 21st" he said

"I considered it Mr. Stane, but then I thought, 'Meh, who wants to be reminded of a generation hell-bent on profiteering on nostalgia and channelling themselves through past achievement?'**"** she responded

"Nobody knows what they want in this present time, we're all over the place" the man replied

"That's the part of humanity that always hooks me sir, the not knowing. Forces us to be a bit more creative don't you think?" the hologram replied.

The man, Stane, huffed. He didn't subscribe to the notion at all, maybe that was the bane of his species...that they leave all the wonderment to the formative years of developing software and the innocence of youth, before the harsh reality set in with experience and adulthood

Stane and his hologram exited the elevator and entered his private office chambers. Inside was a vast table that stretched across the room, a pool table, and a small drinks cabinet. Stane took an immediate liking to the latter and poured himself some vintage wine

"Switch to secretary mode" he commanded, the hologram changed her appearance to match that of a think woman with glasses, tied back hair and a blue sweater.

Stane took immediate notice and shook his head, "Do you need to remind me of work so early in the morning?"

"I have a feeling it'll be a vocal point of your first few conversations today" the hologram replied

"Just get on with it" Stane said, "How many calls have I missed"

The hologram's eyes flickered with data streaming down her gaze. Each time she blinked, several numbers locked in, creating a mathematical equation. She blinked one further time and an overall number came up in her eyelids.

"Approximately fifty-three calls, all but one are spam"

"All from Channel 52 no doubt, they always send out the exact same number of messages as their channel, some kind of branding exercise, patch me into the final call will you?"

The hologram obeyed. An enthusiastic voice rang out over Stane's loudspeakers

"Hey dude, can I call you dude? No, you hate that, just checking, l love it when people get irked at the little things, puts a gleam in my good eye. Anyway, Jones here, just wanted to let you know I've written you a letter, or rather, a list, I'm operating on time-sensitive e-mail frequencies, so as soon as you hear this, the letter will be instantly forwarded to you. It's a list of all your available combers, once you get to Paradigm Six, get in touch with me as soon as you can. Jones out"

Sure enough, once the call ended, the printer in Stane's office came to life and the letter was printed out. Stane walked over, steadily nursing his drink and took a look at the list supplied to him.

As he scrolled down, he paused, and looked visibly shaken, he downed the rest of his drink in one gulp and sat down.

"Anything the matter sir?" the hologram asked

"The P6 hub has vanished from our listings, gone, vanished without a trace, why?" Stane asked, before looking at the hologram's appearance with more of a disapproving glare

"What's the name of that woman again? It's clearly from the P6 comber's less important layers"

"Irma Langestien" the hologram replied

"I thought you _weren't _about nostalgia?" Stane said, observing the familiar look of the hologram and her actions.

"It's not a matter of nostalgia sir, the urgent matter you need to discuss with Jones is one of preserving family and all associated with them" the hologram replied

"My god, he's hacked you hasn't he? That's why you didn't stop him when he obviously 'appropriated' the file, now he expects me to contact him and beg him to restore it" Stane replied, and took to his cabinet to pour himself another drink

"I don't see the problem with this sir, it made very good business sense in my view, and I always look out for the best interests of the company, as per my priority programming. P6 wasn't yielding the proper results, out of the many channels on offer, only seven have ever been approved in the last thirty years"

"There are reasons you phenomenally fickle phantom, nobody likes overkill" Stane argued back, throwing the glass at the hologram. It passed straight through it and hit the wall, shattering into several small shards.

"I'll tell your mistress not to tread into the chambers in her evening wear until you get that cleaned up" the hologram replied

Stane groaned, and quickly attempted to assert self-control. He placed both hands on his face and then onto his hips and paced up and down the room, he took a box of cigars out of his desk, took out one and lit it with a lighter found in his pockets.

"Patch him through, if you can" he said. The hologram obeyed.

The wall behind Stane opened up and a large black monitor screen flared into life.

A woman with lush emerald green hair and razor-tipped eyebrows greeted him

"This is the Jones residence, who may I serve?" she said

"Gravis Odious Stane from _Division Prime Perspectives_" Stane replied

"One moment please" the woman said, and bombarded Stane with the usual type of music that intrudes on the senses whenever someone is placed on hold.

Finally, he got through to a composed, if slightly off-kilter bald-headed man in a yellow t-shirt and a slack grey overcoat, he was stuffing his face with a pizza slice, and he had headphones in his ear

"Salutations dude, how's it hanging?" the man, Jones, said.

"What in heaven's name do you think you're playing at? P6 was one of our earliest acquirements and breakthroughs in 'interpretive time' technology, who are you to come in and convince my people to just hand it to you?"

Jones performed a small but rather embarrassing dance as he continued to indulge in the music on his headphones, before taking them off to address Stane more sternly.

"It wasn't so much your people as it was your programme, who can be persuaded with some choice leet speak, if you catch my drift"

"You hacked her" Stane realized.

"Better than _slashing_ her...and being her creator, you should think a little more about not doing that yourself...or does she not know about that last bit given you probably delete all of those simulations from her archive memory? Tell you what...I'll put in a firewall programme to ensure she never does forget those instances, and I'll also have her remember she has a hard light protocol that she can turn on and off at her leisure"

He took out a small tablet and played about with it. Before Stane's eyes, the hologram slowly solidified, forming a rock solid physical prescence. She smiled in approval at being bestowed with the gift.

"Now, let's get down to business and defeat the huns shall we?" Jones continued, "As to why I appropriated the P6 comber, well, as my new friend has already pointed out to you during your own period of bonding, it wasn't giving the company enough heavy hitters to run in syndication was it? Supply and demand Stane, you want the story of four green mutant reptiles to keep conquering the world, you gotta have an empire to build, not a baker's dozen"

"Your new 'friend' also told me this was a family issue...as you may know from what we sent out in our press release, anyone who signs up for the comber programme does it of their own accord, their interpretive histories across the multiverse spectrum become public domain" Stane replied.

"Oh I know how it works Mr. Stane, but here's the kicker, my family tree was an exception because the project was started under a curtain of crude idiocy, top-level security approved by Bishop and his higher up henchmen years before 'interpretive time' became an official tagline for branding purposes. Hell I discovered it was founded shortly after the Turtle Prime incident almost wiped reality off the map. They didn't want to run the risk of an enemy of the Turtles throwing everything in creation under the bus so they started acquiring the technology, through the aid of a pair of Donatellos, to map and monitor all possible channels. That's a lot to comb through.

Then, a mondo notion enriched their gnarly lives and unfortunately made a mint out of yours...what if you could store the essences of the multi-verse incarnations in one hive mind computer mainframe and project it into the dreamscapes of every channel's inhabitants so as to ensure every version of April, Leonardo, Casey, Irma, Raph, Mikey, Don, hell even Splinter, anyone that had _ever _went through a bad patch, that they'll come out the other end of their otherwise troubled, hectic and conflicted lives smelling of the finest roses? All of them would wake up in the morning with no real recollection of talking to their rather altered state of reflection, but the vague recollection, buried deep in the subconscious, would be there and helping to guide their mentalities. Win-win situation for all don't you think?"

Jones took another portion of his pizza and chomped away at it, continuing to speak even though his mouth was partially full. Stane had to struggle to make coherent sense of the next bit.

"When you started franchising the project shortly after the government archive became available commercially, using the comber mainframe to scan and store the essences of the multi-verse for a lot of world-changing leaders, oh it was Christmas for you wasn't it? All of a sudden you could convince every Kennedy, every King, every Ghandi, that they could match or even better their prime versions? Oh but then you got clever, once you downloaded the essences into the combers you started informing them of the _mistakes_ of the versions you were projecting out to the masses for entertainment purposes, so each time they dreamt, they would receive the right words of encouragement to ensure they were placed on a richer path, and that would be beamed out across the airwaves and across the internet to the fickle masses who would learn the inner-most workings of a million incarnations of the same idea"

"I don't see what any of this has to do with you stealing a piece of my enterprise" said Stane, "If you have a point, make it, or do you carry any bullets that aren't blank in your range of verbal weaponry?"

" I was more than fine with letting you run around parading my family on visual display these last thirty years, but then you did something commonly associated with all degrees of cleverness and egotism, you got impatient and paranoid. Paranoid about only getting seven interpretations approved for transmission, so you thought you'd be a crazy little kitten and start messing about with the youngest interpretation yet of April O'Neil. The _youngest_. Interpretation Six I believe. The one you're streaming currently?"

"That's the one" Stane confirmed.

"All the other interpretations had interventions when they were slightly older, closer to mid life crisis level, but oh no, not her, you subjected her to the mainframe all for the viewing pleasure of every sycophant on the planet, you subjected her to a grilling before her peers, way before she was of any sound age and mentality to understand what was going on a mature level. Oh the April from interpretation _TWO _did her best, she rose to the occasion and was far more subtle about things, and it helped ease her into a season in the blue all by herself, but you weren't satisfied with that, and thus you broke the golden rule, you actually inserted a Trojan, dressed her up as the one from interpretation five, OUR known reality, and whispered sweet somethings in her ear about where it is she's going and what the people in her life from that point on will mean to her. You put her on a path YOU, not any of them, dictated, now we'll never know if her decisions or up to her or due to what your Trojan suggested"

"Doesn't that make for more unexpected results?" Stane asked, taking another drink from his cabinet, this time he didn't bother pouring into a glass, he took a full swing at the contents of the bottle.

"When you start poisoning the well, when you start staging interventions IN interventions, you run the risk of altering the psychology and premises of the world you're exploring...what right do you have to do that?"

"Then you may as well stand in judgement of the entire system, you may as well take down the entire thing and not just take one component. If you ask me, Mr. Jones, I think you just fear a change in gear, The TMNT and their story is one that deserves to be told, it inspires generations upon generations of lively young minds, minds that will go out and create toys, stories, play games, the wheel continues to turn, and when we run out of a story to tell, long before it can reach the end of its natural lifespan, we tell it again and again from the beginning. Nobody tires of it that way...and before you started meddling in our affairs, we were prepared to tell that story in a way that nobody had dared interpreted it before...why peer into the looking glass when you can truly reach out and touch the reflection? I see a grand candle flickering eternally, and I see a grand hand folding itself around the flame, not to extinguish it, but to grasp it's light and absorb it, what if it were like Icarus holding in his hand a piece of the sun that eroded his wings, and through holding it, he soared to greater heights"

Jones raised an eyebrow, and toasted Stane with his own glass

"A touching speech...and you're right, if I were a more righteous man, I'd take down the whole network, hell if I were anything like a Casey Jones, I might not settle for just the mainframe, maybe your entire firm would be reduced to slight traces of dust, but I won't do that, a wise old ninja master, Splinter I believe, once said, _"It is not that we change the world, but that we help others see the sense in it_", to me, having my ancestors on my mother's side in my hands again makes the most sense, because then they can teach not the same interpretations, but the next generation, how to see past creed, colour, race, and realize we're all the same voice, we follow the same path, and we'll all get along just fine if we keep on that same path"

"How touching" Stane replied coldly.

"Something I learned from interpretation One. The REAL version, not your Trojan" Jones replied, "She came to me in a vision, I practice meditation, much like Splinter did back in the day, I can access the mainframe using just my mind, no tv box, and the mental barriers in my mind mean the conversations I have in there aren't privy to the world at large. Maybe one day I'll reveal that little magic trick to the masses, when I feel important enough, right now family is important, and I'd rather you leave us in peace to get acquainted more now. I've got a lot of relatives to meet"

"How do you reckon I'll leave you in peace? You've committed a crime, I can have you arrested"

"No dice mate...you, you there, holo-babe, diva-gram...what's your name?" Jones asked

"Quite timely of you to ask me that, now that I'm physical" replied the hologram affectionately

"Quite...Timely. Q.T. Yeah. Yeah that rolls off the tongue doesn't it? Q.T, do me a favour and start transmitting all of what is stored in your core memory protocols, every business venture, on and off the record, legal and illegal, every thought and word he's exchanged with you about women, economics, family, oh and even kids, hell even the remarks he deposited in your lost memory subroutines, I can bring it back up for you if you want from my end. Beam all that information into the remaining comber fields and share the information with the billions, and billions, of interpretations stored in the mainframe. It should give them something else to talk about other than themselves for once, could even make them and Joe Public even see the sense in things if the idiot's lantern is lighting the way"

Stane instantly panicked.

"No, no, Mr. Jones, surely we can arrange some kind of compromise..."

"Give me my family" Jones requested

"But what about the interpretation we're running? We can't just cancel it, we ordered multiple seasons, we have to press on" Stane said

"Focus on someone else" Jones suggested

"Who? Name one" Stane replied

"Someone from The Foot Clan perhaps?" suggested Jones

"Them? They're the enemy" Stane argued.

"Oh yes, the enemy, we all so love painting the history of multiple interpretation with very broad strokes don't we? " Jones said, polishing off the last slice of his pizza and downing his glass of water

"...Here's the thing, there's been this hope, this underlining hope, a slim one, and it's been running through the clan for generations, there's someone amongst its ranks who can be honest to god redeemed, you know the one"

"Oh not her...she always goes the other way, if you know of the Turtle Prime incident you know full well she switched her loyalties back to her father all the way until it became painfully obvious his intents were to mean the death of everything around her, including herself" Stane replied

"She's got her issues, but that's what everyone loves don't they? She'll provide endless more endearment and tension than you can ever muster out of April, or Donatello, or Casey. Think about it, focus on her journey, give her an interpretive mainframe, just stay clear of Trojans, let the real deals guide her subconsciously. It's high time one of the official channels showed that Karai can finally be considered part of the clan Yoshi. This version is perfect because she's directly connected to her mentor, this type of struggle to become one with her family again is ratings gold waiting to happen"

Jones looked at the small tablet in his right hand, and showed it to Stane.

"I'm going to send you the P6 layers back, minus the O'Neil paradigms, focus all your attention on this, and do me a favour...leave interpretation zero's version of Karai out of things. As much as we owe the entire programme to that universe, she's just too far gone to dare have her interact with any other version"

Stane thought long and hard, then nodded, "agreed". Jones tapped a button on his tablet

"Check your grid again. I'll be in touch, peace dude" Jones said, and the screen went blank

Stane checked the grid again to find most of P6 restored. Stane breathed a sigh of relief, as he turned around, he was drilled in the temple by the now physical Q.T

"Sorry sir, payback protocols" she said

"You don't have any such programming" Stane said, then realized Jones was to blame

"Next time you try to slash me, I am to tap into your credit banks and slash half your income" she said, "Now, I've got a lot of adjusting to do in this body and I feel a good pampering coming along, you will provide me with such relaxation methods, yes?"

Stane was fit to be tied.

**-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-**

In the comfort of his home, Jones watched as the television screens projected the image of Karai, the current representation of her, from interpretation six, the daughter of Hamato Yoshi, now adopted child of his sworn enemy Oroku Saki, The Shredder, a damaged individual who had tried allying with the Turtles, only to be slowly poisoned by Shredder's lies and circumstances beyond any and all control, now she was an enemy of her once so nearly allies, and all to oblivious to the family ties they represent.

She found herself in a blackened void, a honeycomb surrounding her, of channels approved and unapproved, it was up to those watching to determine if they were fact or fiction.

"Welcome Blossom" said the voice, "You have entered the cradle"

"Who's there? Show yourself"

The woman stepped into the light, dressed in a kimono, a sword held in her hand

"Where am I? Everything is so dark, and cool..." Karai said

"So much trouble written in your soul, so much damage hidden in your expression, and yet you are so young, you've barely stepped out of the cradle. You must learn not to bask so long in an area full of grey"

Jones smiled and turned the television off, he looked at his tablet and read a file marked "P6 Interface", he toasted it with another glass of water

"Hey mom, and dad, and your moms and dads, all the way back to where it began...nice to have you all back" he said. He glanced over to some family valuables hanging on his wall, a hockey stick, a golden puck, the photo of a dashing young boy and a cybernetic servant, a bo staff, nun-chucks, sais and katana blades. All above a flickering d fireplace with a collection of other vintage memorabilia from assorted generations

"Kept it all with me, every heirloom, from every age, all situated here, and long may it go on as I pass it to the next child. That's coming by the way, I promise you, just have to kick some habits, like the fast food intake, I threw it up again, yep, all the way up, I never learn my lessons. Still, I've got the knack for trouble like Michelangelo, as well as his appetite, got Donatello's knack for a brainwave, Raph's cockiness kept my cool, and I have Leonardo's composure, they're all in there, you, her, him, everyone. You've told your story, now...maybe it's time we concentrated on someone else, the hardest thing to interpret is how we go from the cradle to the grey, now maybe that Karai is getting divine interventions in interpretive time, we'll find out that process works, and make sense of it. That's the world is mom, April, Turtles, Splinter, that's what keeps it going...common, unrivalled sense"

Giving the tablet all his love, Michael Don Jones settled down on the carpet in a meditative position, composed himself, and slowly melted into a relaxed state of mind, drifting into the private world of conversation and bonding with all those assembled in the now liberated corners of the P6 mainframe comber.

Freedom of spirit

Peace of mind

Makes all the sense in the world.


End file.
